


Written in the Bone

by rose_griffes



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Unrequited Love, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-12
Updated: 2011-04-12
Packaged: 2017-10-24 01:16:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/257246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rose_griffes/pseuds/rose_griffes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The monster crawled out of the fairy tale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Written in the Bone

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [In My Body is My Destiny](https://archiveofourown.org/works/161157) by [deborah_judge](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deborah_judge/pseuds/deborah_judge). 



Mama was made of measured time, of quick, even steps and precisely made beds. Daddy was wild movement, music, and art. (Even when she was little Kara understood that they were a disaster waiting to happen; their shouts and silences echoing off the walls of every apartment and house where they lived.)

Daddy liked fairy tales. Mama didn't. The storybooks all left the bookshelves shortly after Daddy disappeared. (One part of her liked to imagine that Daddy had come and taken them, that they weren't lying in a trash heap somewhere and that the only reason he didn't take her as well was because Mama said no.)

Kara smuggled books home from the library in her backpack where they stayed except for when she was reading them on the floor next to the bed. She could shove them underneath the bed and pull out her homework when she heard her mother's footsteps. The books brought monsters and creatures of magic to life with words on dust-edged pages, illustrations in faded colors swirling inside the borders. Kara wanted to believe in them but soon the spell of words faded like the inks.

 _Once upon a time the humans made us. They created us for combat and for sex. My grandfather was a fighting machine, my grandmother was a sex toy._

Mama didn't tell fairy tales with happily ever after endings, but she had stories of her own. When she was in the right mood she'd tell Kara about the staff sergeant she knew who lost a leg in the war against the cylons, or about training exercises gone wrong and how she'd dragged a man twice her size out of the road.

That was when she was still trying to be good for her mother, because maybe then her mother wouldn't hit her.

(Her mother was like that because Kara was bad, and because she was special, and Kara never thought to question how those two pieces fit together. Instead she made sure everyone else knew that she was bad. Because then she was special too, even if they didn't know it.)

Even as the relationship between Kara and her mother got worse Mama's stories about the military bonded them; something they could find to talk about that wasn't filled with emotional landmines. Kara wanted to be like the soldiers of her mother's tales; she would slay the monsters as did the heroes from her father's storybooks.

Then she stopped listening to her mother's stories; the metal monsters once summoned had long disappeared and her mother's voice dimmed like fading ink on the pages.

 _They made us of wires and sheets of metal. Claws to rip and tear through human flesh and bone. We lived up to the purpose for which we were made. If hewn down, we were remade. We learned._

Pyramid was her passion, and she was good, but her body betrayed her, so she returned to the heroes of her mother's stories and enlisted, and she was better than good. She flew like she was made for it, for this gravity-defying dance.

Kara learned to fight as well--not just with her fists but with weapons. She could take a gun and shoot more accurately than the others at paper targets covered with images of the man-made freaks her mother used to fight. In a Viper she could use her weapons to tear apart targets in space.

(It wasn't good enough. Nothing ever was, and now her mother's voice in her head was louder than ever, even after death.)

 _They covered our metal skeletons with soft skin and shiny hair. Humans touched us and frakked us and stuck us back inside closets when they were finished. We were programmed to sigh and say "I love you." We said the words over and over, and watched, and stayed. It was all that we knew._

Then she came back to solid ground and trained others to fly, and she learned to love someone who didn't care about her mother's expectations.

It was exhilarating, like flight was, including the fear of falling as she spiraled down. (His brother wasn't what she expected; she tripped and the gravity almost caught her.)

Then he was gone and it was her fault. She exiled herself, taking refuge with his father; he didn't know what she had done. He was safety, stability and affection.

 _My grandfather who killed and my grandmother who spoke words of love, we were made to your commands. Our bones hold the memory of what we were, of what you made us._

Then the monsters of her mother's stories came back. Everything shattered in their grasp. Even the bones of her mother, long-dead, would have burned in the military cemetery, melted in the blasts.

They learned that the monsters hadn't disappeared; instead they were waiting. Once made of metal, some now wear skin, organic. Her weapons no longer strike paper targets, they seek flesh.

 _I could tear you apart from limb to limb. I can tell you that I love you. I do love you, Kara Thrace._

She fought until she was numb, then fought some more. Then they were gone. Automatons, robots: the name didn't matter. They said they had a different path.

Even if the machines hadn't stopped, this new planet kept the people protected. Invisibility cloaked them here and they stayed.

By then Kara had learned to treasure peace and the people who made the voices in her head quieter. First Zak, then Sam. On a planet that didn't feel anything like home she built one for herself with him.

 _I've seen it. God gave me a vision, but it's more than that. My destiny is written in my body, this shape that was formed by God and my makers for two purposes: to kill and be killed, and to be pleasing to you._

Like the monster that leaps out in a horror movie when you think he's dead, they keep coming back. Now she's the captured princess locked away in a tower, the prize to be won.

He--no, _it_ \--is neither loud nor silent, its voice a quiet murmur without echo. A pieced-together machine brought to life with electricity, a golem with words placed in its mouth, words carved _underneath_ its skin.

It tells her stories she won't hear, of beginnings that she never saw.

 _There is so much forgiveness to be asked, and I am not going to ask it. You will kill me. You will embrace me. It was for these things that I was made._

Leoben Conoy tells her stories, a forked tongue hidden under the demeanor of a man; clay shaped into skin and bones.

A machine that speaks of absolution; life has taught Kara that it doesn't exist. Instead she draws her story in scarlet and crimson; she carves truth, death and other endings into his skin with sharpened eating utensils.

Kara Thrace will not accept living like the helpless princess in a fairy tale. She'll create a different version in weapons and blood.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2011 [bsg_remix](http://bsg-remix.livejournal.com/) challenge.


End file.
